Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-12-16 00:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | rosario ortiz |
WHO Rosario Ortiz
WHEN Monday 6 December to Saturday 11 November
WHERE Brooklyn
WHAT Just a long-ass week
WARNINGS None
It was inevitable, really, that the wheels were gonna fall off the wagon sooner or later. At this point, the entire machine is mostly hanging together with Scotch tape and raw hard-headedness. Rosario hasn’t touched her telescope in over a week, since the day Apollo told her the stars had spoken to her. The sight of it sitting on its tripod in the corner of her room makes her fingers itch. The stars don’t belong to anyone. They exist on the kind of scale where ordinary human conceptions of size and distance just straight-up can’t cope. Own them? You might as well say you own a day of the week, or a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The stars are gonna do what they do no matter what you want from ‘em, and the best you can do is try and understand them. It’s reassuring, or at least Rosario’s always found it so. Doesn’t matter how bad a job Mami and Dad are doing of pretending they’re not fighting or how much you’re dreading walking into school every day (always one of the first, trickling into the cafeteria for breakfast with all the other poor kids). Doesn’t matter how crappy work is or how miserable study is or how much of what you knew about the world is slipping like water between your fingers. The stars’ll still be there, tracking across the sky in their predictable patterns. They’re her escape. They’re her haven. They’re a science so clean and elegant and enormous that it feels like a kind of magic. Nobody can own the stars, but when Rosario’s lying under the Milky Way on her apartment roof, she belongs to them. That was what she thought, till Apollo swept all her certainty away with a few breezy words. Oh, the stars showed you the way. They said they miss you. You used to talk to them, but you stopped listening. He was right about the moonrise time on Halloween. She checked. It wasn’t out till nearly four in the morning, and by that time Rosario had probably been in the shower trying to scrub off the stink of death. The moonlight she’d thought she’d seen reflected off the arrow in the tree hadn’t been moonlight, and maybe it hadn’t been there at all. She looked up Orion next. There’s at least a dozen different versions of his story, but they usually involve him hunting with Artemis. Sometimes he was in love with her, sometimes he was. Sometimes she killed him out of anger, sometimes Apollo tricked her into it. He always ended up in the sky. (Maybe he didn't want her to wake up alone, Apollo had mused.) And scrolling through the myths, Rosario remembered her dream of the night before with a deep, horrible foreboding. The plummeting sun, the screaming horses. It took a single Google search to find the story of Phaethon, a demigod child of the Sun who travelled to meet his father. It went badly for him. Out-of-control-sun-chariot, rampaging-horses, fiery-death bad. It doesn’t prove anything. You’re always gonna find patterns if you look hard enough, doesn’t mean they’re there by design. It’s pareidolia, it’s confirmation bias, it’s scraps of stories read once and half-forgotten, and that’s all it could possibly be, because there’s no such thing as fate. These are the things she tells herself. She used to believe them. She wants – god, she needs – to believe them again. But no amount of repeating it keeps the truth from prickling the hairs of her arms and itching in her fingertips. So Rosario hasn’t touched her telescope and she’s kept away from the roof at night, because who knows what else she’ll see if she looks? She sleeps badly, dreams swarming with colliding galaxies and clashing constellations, and wakes to sheets sodden with sweat. This is Rosario’s week. Monday: Work, then classes, scraping whatever time she can in between both to study for finals. Turns out taking on an unofficial double major in Weird Shit is really gonna cut into your study schedule and now Rosario’s badly behind on revision. She spends lunch cramming her psych medicine notes, which is definitely the kind of reading material you need when you’re already freaked about seeing things that might not really be there. When she gets open, she opens the door on an argument in full flight. Abuela’s frowning, arms tightly folded against her chest; Ma’s at the kitchen table, foot propped on a chair, hands flying in a way very reminiscent of Rosario. “—with what money, Mama?! You already done spent it on lawyers for everyone else!” And that’s how Rosario finds out that her mom twisted her ankle on the way into work. She reported it all by the book and got sent along to the company doctor; he diagnosed her with a light sprain and recommended staying off her feet, of all the shitty jokes. It’s Christmas rush. The store’s stretched to breaking and her manager says workers’ comp don’t apply because she was on her commute (she was walking in the damn front door). Without ever straight-up saying it, he implies that she shoulda been more careful. No wonder Abuela’s fired up and talking about lawyers. It’s bullshit. Ma doesn’t need to be told that. But Ma also knows what happens to store associates who fight for workers’ comp: it’s a fast track to getting promoted to customer. Apollo would probably say she’s being unreasonable again. With the doctor’s note, Ma negotiates and is granted – grudgingly – a stool to sit on at the register. She goes straight back to work. Tuesday: Lab with Apollo. Rosario’s already sitting, poring over her revision notes when he walks in the door. She raises her head to find him watching her, and when he catches her eye a smile dawns across his features like she’s just made his entire day. She’s not the only one who notices. “Are you dating Archer?” Mehreen asks it as matter-of-factly as, five minutes ago, she asked if Rosario had notes on last week’s histology lecture. Mehreen’s a matter-of-fact type of person; Rosario appreciates that about her. She’s usually the one in their study group to steer everyone back on task when the others wander off the subject. They’re not in a group right now. They’re sitting in a corner of the library, textbooks and study notes piled between them, and Mehreen is watching her thoughtfully. “Am I— what?” Rosario feels the blood rush to her face, and realises an instant later what it must look like, which only makes her splutter more. “No! God, no. I don’t even like him.” Mehreen gives her a measured look, and Rosario can see the conclusions solidifying behind her eyes. “Well,” she says mildly, “he seems to like you.” “He doesn’t,” Rosario says, a little too quickly, a little too firmly. “Not like that. He just likes messing with me.” Mehreen blinks. “Okay.” Rosario doesn’t like the way she says it. It’s all mollifying. It’s not an I-accept-these-facts-as-presented-to-me okay, it’s an I-can-see-you-don’t-want-to-talk-about-t “Mehreen,” she says, an awful suspicion spiking, “are people talking about me and Archer?” And that’s how Rosario finds out her name’s entered the college rumour mill. Wednesday: There’s a rumour making the rounds of the building, too. It’s a perennial one, sweeping through the halls with a regularity like the changing of the seasons, but this time it’s borne out by a letter in the mail. Rent’s going up in February. It’s the third increase in two years, and it’s not hard to see why. Bushwick’s deep in the throes of gentrification, they’ve been seeing it for years in the luxury apartments shooting up like weeds and the multiplying numbers of cops on the street. Bodegas are being made over into yoga studios, local bars into trendy nightlife destinations selling twenty dollar cocktails, everywhere the familiar bright, densely-lettered bilingual storefront signs giving way to trendy minimalism. A million little ways of letting families like Rosario’s and Lyra’s know that they’re not welcome here anymore, but none of ‘em hit as hard as those unforgiving numbers on the page. “We’ll make it work,” says Ma, with a grimly determined set to her jaw, but there are shadows under her eyes and her ankle, propped on a mountain of cushions, is red and swollen. “I don’t want you to worry ‘bout it, m’ija.” So of course, Rosario starts worrying. Thursday: Walking out of a two-hour population health lecture, Rosario swipes open her phone to find a barrage of texts waiting for her. They’re all from Lyra, starting out excited and turning progressively flaily over the course of a few minutes. Lyra’s been talking birthday plans with Patrick. She’s keen for karaoke with the two of them, and Patrick wants to know if it’s okay to bring his girlfriend (his girlfriend the Muse, his girlfriend Rosario’s aunt), and before Rosario can process that, down comes the real bombshell: just to let you know, Patrick tells Lyra, my girlfriend is Rosario’s aunt. They never told Patrick Rosario was Apollo’s daughter. And that’s how Rosario finds out that her stupid azaroso of a father has been telling his entire family about his shiny new daughter. As in the whole of fucking Olympus, behind her back. It probably never crossed his mind to ask. Rosario’s stopped frozen in the corridor, the rest of the class skirting and jostling around her on their way to their next classes. Apollo’s probably somewhere among them; she doesn’t even have the energy to look. Probably a bad idea, anyway. People already think they’re secretly hooking up; she doesn’t need to throw fuel on the fire by yelling at him for telling his family about her. Friday. “Why you always doing that?” Camino asks. Closed doors don’t mean any-damn-thing in this apartment. Nobody ever knocks, they just come and go however they like, never mind Rosario’s here trying to study for finals. (She hasn’t been, not like she should. She had the afternoon carved out, but Lyra’s got plans to introduce Jocelyn and Jem to Patrick tomorrow and needed help workshopping how she’s gonna break the whole saint thing. That turned into more than two hours on the roof, Lyra pacing as she brainstormed, Rosario writing furiously, the two of them together massaging the notes into a kind of script. So now it’s only a few hours till work and she needs to smash through at least some of this psych revision, and somehow instead she’s been sitting here wasting time paging through this book Patrick told her about, and she swears there was a time she used to be organised.) Rosario lifts her eyes from her notes with an audible huff, letting her impatience be known. “Do what?” “That.” Camino waves her index finger at Rosario’s desk. “Every time I’m coming in here, you covering up what you doing with your big-ass book.” “No I’m not.” That’s exactly what she’s been doing. Her room’s not exactly private, so she’s had to find other workarounds to hide her research. Lyra might be ready to open up to her family; Rosario would still rather gouge her own eyes out with hot skewers. She’s gotten in the habit of keeping a stack of textbooks and study notes in easy reach on her desk, ideal for quickly covering over anything that might raise an eyebrow. It’s become reflexive at this point. Camino’s eyebrows are inching up skeptically now. “Right. So you won’t mind if I—” They both lunge at the same time; Cam gets there first, with a victorious “hah!” as she pries the library book loose from beneath the heavy brick of Grant’s Anatomy Atlas. When she turns over the cover she scrunches her nose, clearly having been expecting something juicier. “Oh my god, don’t tell me you having a spiritual crisis.” The True Life of Saint Patrick is the title, printed in curling Celtic lettering against a backdrop of rolling green Irish hills. It’s the book Rosario’s aunt wrote, she’s been told, to help stitch back together Patrick’s memories. Seeing it in her sister’s hands, Rosario turns cold. “Give it the fuck back, it’s a library book.” She’s pushing her chair back, storming round the desk, but Camino’s seen the flash of alarm and is already dancing out of the way, holding the book up out of reach. “For real, Charo, you’re not gonna turn into one of those tightass Catholics like Grandma Olga, that’d be so fucking boring—” Rosario makes a swipe and misses. She flushes a dark red at Camino’s smirk. “It’s a history book, you jerk! Some people actually read to be informed about the world.” On the third try, she catches her sister’s wrist and wrenches the book free. Camino wrinkles her nose. “Ugh. Well, you got the tightass part down, that’s for sure.” So instead of revision, Rosario spends most of the time before her diner shift finding new hiding places to stash her weird-shit research. It’s a long shift, with the merciful advantage of at least being a quiet one. No messy drunks or irresponsible parents or other miscellaneous pains in the ass. She snatches what study time she can between cleaning and the very occasional customers. Once, she leaves her notebook too close to the stovetop when somebody waves her over for a coffee refill. The pan spits, speckling the open page with tiny dots of cooking oil. The largest spots map out almost perfectly the constellation of Orion. She falls into bed at three in the morning, her hair still smelling of bacon and grease, and dreams the moon golden and full, bathing light between marble columns. The snakes are golden, too, scales like glittering metal, but when they brush against her bare arms, Rosario thinks of leather. The stone floor is cold as the night’s breath against her cheek. She fell asleep, she remembers now, panic spiking in her chest as the snake on the right skims her hand. She fell asleep and she’s not sure if she meant to and now she’s stuck here, frozen, waiting for the snakes to pass her by. There’s a second snake to her left. She can’t see it anymore, it’s slipped beyond her line of sight, but she knows it’s still there. She has to bite down a yelp when it nudges her shoulder. Go away. She’s thinking it as loud as she can, screaming it in her mind, her lips pressed tight over a sob. Go AWAY. But the snakes press closer, smooth coils looping round her arms, gliding along her shoulders, ghosting over the nape of her neck, and now their blunt faces are nuzzling into her ears and god, please, leave me ALONE. A forked tongue flutters out and tickles her ear canal and she feels it like a full-body shudder, like a premonition, like somebody walking over her grave. Rosario presses her face into the marble and balls her fists. The snakes lap at her ears and the scream builds and builds in her chest. They stay with her like that till dawn’s rosy fingers burnish their scales. Saturday begins at a quarter to six, when Rosario hurls herself from bed, soaked with sweat and streaming tears. She makes it to the toilet just in time and heaves till there’s nothing left inside her but bile. The tears are coming harder now, blurring her vision to a smudge of light and shadow, and she’s gotta stay quiet gotta get up gotta flush rinse her mouth wash her face take a shower get changed but she can’t hold the list steady in her mind. Everything’s bleeding together and she’s frozen again, like in the dream. Snakes on the floor of Apollo’s temple, licking the sleepers’ ears clean, opening their minds to divine prophecy. She read the description a few days ago, in the story of the seers Cassandra and Helenus, which is probably where her sadistic subconscious pulled it from, but how the fuck would she know. It’s like the grease spatter last night. It’s Jesus in a piece of toast. Once you start looking for patterns, you’re gonna find them everywhere, and how are you gonna separate out the real shit from the paranoia? Her mom finds her there, legs splayed on the bathroom floor, face blotchy, lashes stiff with drying tears. She doesn’t ask a single thing, which Rosario loves her for. Just hobbles across the tiles and coaxes her up and helps her to wash her face. Then she guides Rosario to the couch and limps over to the kitchen and sets the cafetera to brewing. And god, if this isn’t love. A hot plate of toast and a steaming cafecito and a hug with a such a warmth and a fierceness behind it that Rosario can feel her eyes burning all over again. “It’ll be okay, baby,” Ma whispers against her shoulder. “I promise, it’ll all be okay.” That’s where the wheels fall off, on the cold bathroom floor in the predawn, ears ringing with a serpent’s-tongue tickle she might only have imagined, the back of her throat burning with a very real bile. But on Saturday afternoon, Lyra sends out an SOS. Roz, fuck, I’ve made the biggest mistake. It went bad with Jem and Jocelyn. Real bad. Locked-in-the-bathroom-crying-while-they’r So Rosario Scotch-tapes herself back together and she messages back, You wanna get out of there for a while? And this is love, too: cheap wine and M&Ms and hooting at terrible cooking shows on Rosario’s laptop underneath Lyra’s abortive attempt at a pillow fort. “We’ll figure it out,” Rosario promises, squeezing Lyra tight and refusing to think of all the things she ain’t got figured yet. If Scotch tape and hard-headedness is all they’ve got, she’s just gonna have to make it work. |